Technology keeps progressing, offering new channels and methods to engage customers through marketing. As we enter a new decade, B2B buyers are researching and placing orders in very different ways than in the past. One reason is because of technology, but another one is because more than 70 percent of millennials are making buying decisions. In the current climate, B2B researchers do at minimum of 12 online searches before looking at a specific website. Millennials are looking for similar high-quality experiences they have with B2C purchases.
This means that B2B businesses need to find new ways for decision-makers to discover them, and digital space has unlimited channels to accomplish that. Here are five ways for your company to get started in 2020.
1. Personalize Prospect Communications
72 percent of buyers expect B2B organizations to offer personalized communications that meet their needs. If your business doesn’t meet their needs, they will switch to a company that does.
2. Reexamine Your Email Marketing
Email is the preferred method of business communications for most decision-makers, opening up opportunities to grow. MailChimp studied open rates from 50 different industries, discovering that the average open rate is 21.33 percent. However, with dynamic content and AI, you can improve this percentage.
Using these two types of personalization, you can serve a range of content, tailored to a specific segment of your audience at the proper time to fill their needs and gather data from them. Investing in new email marketing tools using new technology will help leverage your email channel.
3. Invigorate Your Social Media Strategy
About 223 million Americans were on social media channels in 2019. Finding effective ways to reach these people can help grow your B2B business. B2B companies can dismiss social media as a useful way of discovering potential customers, because their sales funnels are complicated and long. But, you can still gain the attention of prospects on Facebook and Instagram. Using a focused strategy on social media, B2B companies can execute their social media marketing with precision for success with defined objectives. Remember that there are social platforms primarily for business such as LinkedIn.
4. Run Specific Content Marketing Campaigns
While written content, blogs and articles, are good solid content to draw customers, new technology allows you to invest in video, AI, and virtual reality content. Interactive content is exciting for everyone and 70 percent of B2B buyers do their research by watching online videos. And, according to Hubspot, 45 percent of marketers plan on adding YouTube as a channel next year.
And another crucial fact is that Google ranks video content higher than written content. Videos can display text, live footage, audio, graphs and animation for customers to engage with. Leads can experience your products and services in vibrant detail without ever leaving their offices.
5.B2B Lead Generation Chatbots Work
Wouldn’t you like to get the benefits of resolving customer issues, booking appointments, and discovering leads automatically without hiring someone to do them? Technology has developed to the point where you can by using custom-designed chatbots. As an example, chatbot templates can guide the chatbot on how to communicate with a customer with the proper responses to questions. Business Insider reports that 80 percent of enterprises will want personalized chatbots in 2020.
These technologies permeate the B2C industry, creating audiences that already expect the same level of personalization and authentic communication from their B2B resources.
